Economics and poofreading

We suggest a major reason why modern writing is often poor.

A group including several of our consultants is currently involved in a discussion of recent professional (and other) writing.  The consensus is that the quality is often very poor; we have previously given examples of historians, but others in the group cited lawyers and (with understandably fewer examples) military intelligence officers.  The talk widened to fiction and to writing in general, both fiction and nonfiction.  Of course anyone old enough to express the idea is convinced that things are not as good as in the Old Days, but in this we’re on a pretty firm foundation.

Our examples came from before the widespread use of AI, so that’s not the culprit.  Part of the problem is that, writing for restricted audiences, professionals often get lazy, allowing a reference to make do for the actual expression of an idea.  But for writing in general we’ve come up with another hypothesis: a distinct lack of English majors.

There’s no question that there are fewer English majors the past couple of decades than in the past, both absolutely and even more as a proportion of college graduates.  This is probably both a cause and an effect of the lower status of writing in today’s society.  But we’re not concerned here with people employed permanently for their expertise in the language, rather with those who did not find such jobs.

In the Old Days one went to college to become an Educated Person, with the field of study a secondary consideration.  (This is an idealization, of course, but still often true.)  And if one were not highly motivated to learn a different language (often necessary for History majors, and always for Foreign Language majors) or deal with advanced Mathematics, English was a common choice.  Most of the resultant graduates would not find permanent jobs in the field; the demand for an expert in literature in the business world was, and remains, small.  But there was temporary employment for the literate graduate in proofreading for publishers of books, magazines and newspapers.  There were many such graduates, they were cheap, and they were effective.

But technology made people more expensive relative to machines; never mind the limitations of a spell-check or even a grammar-checking program.  So there were fewer places for recent English graduates to work while they found their permanent places.  And then a college degree became a path to a job, not an Education.  So many who would have majored in English turned to Business degrees, even if they lacked dreams centered on Wall Street or the boardroom of a large corporation.  In turn, with far fewer English majors, colleges responded to the situation (and helped cause it) by defenestrating their Humanities departments generally.

Note that each of our group has a scientific/engineering major, the Humanities represented (we’re not sure this is official) by one engineer who became a lawyer.  We are all ineligible for Garrison Keillor’s Professional Organization of English Majors.  But we’re thinking of inquiring about associate status.  We think they need all the support they can get.